If Sidney Crosby weren't so mad about the NHL lockout, he'd be impressed.

“There‘s no reason for it,” he told the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review after a Tuesday workout. “For some reason, even if there‘s no way we can make a deal at the moment, we should still be talking every day. I don‘t understand it.”

Both the NHLPA and NHL have expressed a willingness to restart negotiations after a meltdown earlier this month, though that hasn't translated into anything worth talking about. Despite generally agreeing on financial issues, both sides are exploring legal options—the union is voting on whether to file a disclaimer of interest, which would theoretically send the lockout into antitrust courts, and the owners have preemptively filed a lawsuit to guard against that.

It's ridiculous, and Crosby, who has been present for several rounds of meetings, including the ones in New York that led to the current stalemate, knows it.

“I‘m trying not to get too frustrated by it,” Crosby said. “But I think it‘s nonsense that we aren‘t talking every day.”

"Guys are going to be pretty highly in favor of it," Horcoff told ESPN The Magazine. "I’ve been in conference calls with 200-300 players. We just feel at this point the union has done everything they can for us and we’re not getting anywhere. It’s time for us to go in a different direction."

— And, finally, from ESPN's Pierre LeBrun: "Not 100 percent, but it's likely NHL will cancel more games before end of the week."

Games have been canceled through Dec. 30. Commissioner Gary Bettman has said the league doesn't want a season with fewer than 48 games per team, so play would likely have to get under way by mid-January for that to be possible.